


But Not Die Out

by remiges



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Competition, Gen, Gods, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-09-28 18:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17188493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remiges/pseuds/remiges
Summary: The old wars faded into memory, then faded further, but the gods didn't leave. They simply shifted with the world. The tundra shrank to a placid rectangle, a rink that bore little resemblance to permafrost, and Connor's ancestors played war games on it. They challenged the gods there, too, out of grievance or vengeance or want of power.Mostly they died. Sometimes—rarely, very rarely—they won.





	But Not Die Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yeswayappianway](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeswayappianway/gifts).



> Here's a treat, I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Title from ["For The Last Wolverine"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42719/for-the-last-wolverine) by James Dickey.

Back when the land was tundra, when the ice stretched end to end against the horizon, the whole world was a battlefield. Nobody could say whether the gods came first and the fighting followed, or if war itself was enough to create gods out of prayers and lost lives, but it didn't matter. The gods came anyway. 

Their goal wasn't to be worshiped. That's not what made gods. Connor's grandmother liked to tell him that out of hot blood and dying curses, the battlefield spirits raised one of their own to keep invaders away. The next god was chosen when the first fell in battle, and the next, and the next, marching on in a steady succession of violence.

Connor doesn't know if that's true or not, but however they came, whatever the cost, all gods had the same abilities in common: To make a smooth sheet of ice. To taste the thrum of blood under skin. To calm a blizzard. To speak with spirits. To reroute snowmelt. To turn the tides of men.

The old wars faded into memory, then faded further, but the gods didn't leave. They simply shifted with the world. The tundra shrank to a placid rectangle, a rink that bore little resemblance to permafrost, and Connor's ancestors played war games on it. They challenged the gods there, too, out of grievance or vengeance or want of power. 

Mostly they died. Sometimes—rarely, very rarely—they won.

Connor has never seen a god kill anybody. That's not the world they live in now. Maybe that means the current gods have turned soft, but he can't say that's a bad thing. Mostly it's for show, the challengers who face them—face Sid, really—but not always. There was a god before Sid, and before him, and before her, and before her, back as far as memory can stretch. Connor doesn't know what happens when a challenger beats a god and takes their place. Does the god die? Or just fade in power? Fade into another one of the spirits, maybe, or shift back into the mortal they were before? 

Nobody has ever been able to tell him, but Connor plans on finding out. 

***

Sid comes to Connor's village sometimes, walks through the woods and onto the packed earth of the roads. He's always polite (closed off), agreeable (vague), and utterly unassuming.

He's not like that on the ice. On the ice, he's a force of nature. 

He performs for them, though whether it's for entertainment or a reminder of his prowess, Connor doesn't know. It depends on who you ask, whether they're from Sid's village or not. He's not like some of the previous gods who'd left the ice steaming with blood, but the snow isn't always pure by the time he's done, either. 

Sid has worshipers. He protects them, cares for them. Brings them the harvest in the summer and diverts the floods in the spring. He's good to them, but they aren't Connor's village. They aren't Connor's _people_ , and someone needs to look out for them if Sid won't.

Connor always watches the contests, has since he was little. He takes notes now—plans what he should practice and the tactics he should research and the questions he should ask the spirits when he dreams. His interest isn't entirely analytical, though. He doesn't know how anyone's could be. There's just... something about the way Sid moves, graceful and strong and powerful. Deadly.

He's beautiful. Connor doesn't think he should think that, but he does. 

***

Connor reads books, and reads journals, and reads between the lines of the tales the elders tell of their battle days. He listens to stories told by women and men with missing eyes and limbs, and then he asks them to tell him again. The accounts of gods are fragmented and he's still learning, but one day he's going to face Sid, and when that day comes he's not going to lose.

Jack is the only person in the village who's gone to battle against Sid before. He tells the same worn tale to whoever is unlucky enough to catch his eye, rambling on about his great war wound and the sliver of ice Sid had used to deliver it.

"I drank it," he tells Connor over breakfast one morning, the light in the hall glancing over the pockmarks in the wooden trestles. "Or, at least I drank what the healer could save. It was mostly melted by that time. Went right through my side—" he lifts his tunic to show the scar Connor has seen a thousand times, because Jack holds on to his great brush with fame like he doesn't remember he'd lost, "—and that was that." 

Connor doesn't think drinking something gave Jack any of the powers of the gods, regardless of what he'd hoped. After all, ice was just water, no matter who made it. Still, that doesn't stop him from telling everyone about it, over and over, until Connor can hear it in his sleep. 

***

Connor goes out after the first storm of the year hits, when the entire world is ice-bound and the only footprints besides his own are the delicate runes of birds' feet. Above him the sky is a piercing blue, and his breath comes heavy through his scarf, the air so dry it burns his throat. He walks to the woods on the edge of the village, and under the shelter of the trees he…

_...dreams._

The world is the same, just slightly sideways. The cold hovers around him instead of running through him, and the sky intensifies, opens up like a mouth ready to swallow him whole, and Connor walks steadily beneath it as the clouds sit motionless. 

Sometimes Connor wanders alone for hours past the heavy boughs of trees and the frozen ponds, snow crunching under his feet or glittering before him in a fine powder. 

Sometimes Sid walks with him. 

Connor doesn't know where he comes from, if he's part of the dreamscape or if the dreamscape conjures him up. Maybe he lives here, in between the spirit world and the real one. Whenever they meet he's always polite, but Connor doesn't trust polite. _He's_ polite as well, and he knows what runs through his head. 

They'll walk for miles, tracing a path around the valley. The smoke rising from different villages is the only sign of life in the unchanging morning—morning, because Connor never comes here in the afternoon or night. Looking over the valley, he thinks this is as close as he can get to what Sid is, or what he feels like, without being a god himself. 

Connor also trains in the woods for the battlefield, but only when he's alone. He carves branches and practices focusing until he believes they can damage, draw blood and shatter bones. He doesn't know if Sid watches him those times, but he pushes himself anyway. Shows off, sometimes, when he feels like it. He talks to the spirits who live in the valley, the ones who come to watch when he dreams, and they shout encouragement and contradicting corrections. Sometimes they let him command them, but not always. Connor knows they will when he actually faces Sid, though, so that's okay. He used to work with real weapons, but not anymore. If it comes down to that, he really will have lost.

You can't outlast a god, not with mortal stamina or mortal tools. You can, possibly, out- _want_ one however.

The thing is, Connor respects Sid's power, but even gods wane. They just do it slower than regular humans. And when they do, there has to be someone to pick up the slack, take up the mantel for their village. For the valley. 

Sid was young once, like Connor is young. Sid doesn't look that much older, really, but Connor remembers leaving offerings and small trinkets for him as a child. He'd found stones polished smooth by the water and arranged them in flattened cairns at the mouth of the woods where Sid was supposed to live. He'd prayed, but he doesn't remember what for. Connor wonders if Sid knows, if he'd ever heard, if he remembers. 

It doesn't matter. Either way, the land pulls at him, tangles its wild fingers in his hair and throbs with the heavy pump of sap and groundwater. There's nobody who matches Connor in the village—any of the villages—and Connor doesn't care if it's cocky or impossible or sacrilegious. He _wants_. 

He thinks the land wants too. 

***

The goal isn't worship, but. 

It doesn't hurt. 

***

The next time Sid walks into their village, someone asks him about it. He's drawn a crowd, like he always manages to do, and Connor hangs back at the edge, listening. 

"What do you think about the upcoming challenge?" Amanda, the bartender, asks. "What do you think about Connor?" Are you done, is what she's really asking. Are you moving on or getting forced out, and if not, does someone need to measure Connor for a coffin. 

"There's always a time to move on," Sid says. "I think it might be time." 

And, "Connor's talented. He's more talented than I am." 

And, "I wish him the best. I guess we'll see, eh?" 

And Connor doesn't trust anything that seems too easy, but he's always had plans for the future. He doesn't know if they'll come to fruition, but maybe he starts to believe. 

***

The day of the contest, the ice echoes. Connor hadn't been expecting that, but maybe he should have. Every woman, man, and child to step forward in service to their people or their personage has left an imprint on the space. Not just this battlefield, but every sheet of ice, like an indelible history. 

The yew branch he'd cut that morning looks different in his hands when he glances at it from the corner of his eye—not mere wood but something more. Something deadly. He'd thought it would, but it's different to _know_. 

"Ready?" Sid asks from his place in the middle of the ice. He isn't wearing any padding, not the way Connor is. There's a glint in his eye that reminds Connor of nothing more than light on a frozen lake, the kind where the ice could be feet thick or could crack at the slightest pressure.

"Ready," Connor says. He tightens his grip on the yew, and when he takes a breath, the spirits breathe with him. 

***

It doesn't go wrong all at once, which is almost worse. Connor holds his own, maneuvers his spirits and gets in a couple of hits on Sid. They aren't devastating, but he bleeds just like anybody. Connor had already known that, but it's something else when it's by his hand. 

Sid is shining, perfect and deadly, and Connor had known that before as well. He commands his spirits with the ease of experience, and it's exhilarating going up against him. Connor understand why people die for this, now. 

Connor takes a quarter of the ice, then a third. The next third comes harder, his own roster of spirits dematerializing in bright flashes as he and Sid trade blows, circle the ice, regroup. His yew branch slices through the ice barriers Sid erects like they're nothing more than shadows, and the stinging cuts Sid lays on him are barely noticeable against the wash of adrenaline. Connor doesn't think Sid is holding back, but if he is, he won't be for long. 

They meet again and again, scoring the ice with their footsteps and dotting the snow with blood, and it's all going to plan up until Sid smiles. His grin isn't mild-mannered, isn't polite, isn't even _human_. It's sharp and hungry, and Connor doesn't see the icicle until he feels it punch through his side. 

Maybe if Sid didn't think he was a threat, he would leave it at that: a slash and a scar for the grandchildren and a story to wear thin at the tavern. Maybe he's tired of the new offerings of cloth and food and money, secretly longs for the heat of blood melting snow. Maybe he just wants to give the crowd a show. Whatever the reason, the pain holds steady for the length of a breath before it explodes. 

Sid pushes deeper, and the ice slides like lightning (deeper) across his ribs and (deeper) scrapes _bone_. Connor can't scream, the pain is so intense. It steals his air, leaves him choking on the waves of it. He tries to get up and finds he can't remember falling to the ice. Sid crouches next to him and presses a hand to his forehead, settles him back down as easily as a mother with a sick child. All Connor can do is watch, black spots flickering across his vision, as he raises a hand to the gathered crowds. The cheer that goes up is ragged, loyalists from outside of the village only, but it still rattles the air with its violence. 

Connor tries to get up one more time, but only for a moment. Pinned against the blue of the sky, he can just see the spirits melting away around him, their eyes already focused on other worlds. He coughs, and the world starbursts, grays out before coming back in hypercolor. There's just the ice and the sky and the glint of snow in Sid's hair. 

There's blood in Connor's mouth. It tastes like victory, but not his own. 

***

He drags himself home. Nobody will help him after a contest and he can't do anything else, won't die on the ice or stay for the wolves to find him, though he thinks even if he stayed out there all night, blood-soaked and stinking, no scavengers would come. 

Sid owns the land, after all. If he'd wanted Connor dead, he wouldn't have bothered drawing it out. 

Propped in front of the fire in his hearth, still miraculously lit, the icicle hurts worse coming out than it had going in. Connor's tunic is ruined, the padding inside the fabric wet and squelching as he sweats through taking it off. He poultices and bandages the wound as best he can, because while he's never heard of Sid killing someone, that doesn't mean Connor should be stupid. 

Stupid. That's what the villages are going to say. Not _his_ village, or not to his face at least, but all the other ones. The people who came to watch the show, even if they weren't rooting for anyone in particular. Connor's young. That's what they'll say. He's too young, no matter the work or the effort he's put in, the sheer _rightness_ of how it felt on the ice. 

Connor makes it as far as his straw pallet and lies down on his back, tries to ignore the agony coursing through his side. He thinks about the future. Not about what people will say, their condolences or barely veiled amusement, but about the land. About cold streams and the bones of the weary, the scream of a hawk carried by the chill of the wind. About the seasons, stunted and ragged though they may be, and about how winter always last the longest, cuts the deepest. 

Maybe he was a fool to challenge Sid, challenge _Sidney_ , who can command the ice like it's a living thing. The icicle he'd pulled out of his side sits on the hearth, mocking him, and Connor has always gone for what he wanted, pushed and pulled and given it everything he had, and he doesn't plan on stopping, but sometimes… 

Sometimes… 

The _icicle_. 

He forces himself upright, though his side screams, and drags himself to the hearth where he'd dropped it. The icicle should have long since melted from the heat of the fire or his own body, but it hasn't. It shimmers solidly in the flickering light, reflects back a world strange and distorted, and doesn't vanish even when Connor touches it. 

Maybe ice isn't always just frozen water, he thinks. Maybe it _does_ matter who made it. 

He presses the tip against his thumb and watches as his skin bulges under the pressure until the blood wells and spills. The pain is small and insignificant, and Connor wipes up the droplet as it trickles down his palm. It leaves a streak, but he's already thinking about Sid. Beautiful, graceful, powerful Sid. Treacherous, cunning, deadly Sid. 

He thinks about history. He thinks about blood. 

And for the first time since that inexorable shock of pain on the battlefield, Connor smiles. 

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang out with me on [dreamwidth](https://enter-remiges.dreamwidth.org/), where I post fic extras and yell about various things! I'm also on [tumblr](https://enter-remiges.tumblr.com/).


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